Perhaps realising that the PaaS industry requires support for more
than just Java and Oracle Database, Oracle has made an undisclosed
“strategic minority investment” in Engine Yard, who initially
catered exclusively to Ruby on Rails customers, but has since
expanded its offerings to JRuby, PHP and, more recently,
node.js.

Engine Yard will be maintaining its independence for now, and
indeed with a reported revenue of $28 million last year is in a
good position to resist acquisition offers.

The press release doesn’t provide any explicit details, other than
that the companies “expect to work closely together” and will
“connect their respective PaaS”, but what seems most likely is that
they will provide support for each others’ languages. Of course,
it’s not only useful for Oracle, but also for Engine Yard, who will
(presumably) gain support for the
#1 server-side language in the world.

This news is another reminder that we are living in an increasingly
polyglot world where PaaS providers need to provide as much choice
as possible. When specialists like Jelastic, who cut their teeth
providing support for Java alone, are beginning to expand to into other
languages like PHP, companies hoping to dominate the space need to
provide a full set of options.

Today’s announcement is likely to be a good start, but it’s still
far from the full stack: while node.js is a fashionable choice,
Python and .NET will still be missing. To compete with existing
giants AWS – as well as other growing startups – in the cloud
space, Oracle will need more than brand recognition.